“Get a job” is still the right answer: “I suppose we could indulge the energies that drive the Trump movement, i.e. using racial identity politics to help poor whites feel better about dependency. But I don’t want them to feel better about it. I’d much rather they took the necessary steps to improve their condition in life, and that Washington would take such steps as would enable and encourage them.”

In an earlier time, the working men of Chicopee—and Garbutt, and Bridgeport, and Keene, and a thousand other places—could resist this kind of doomed call to class warfare. They were part of a culture of civic virtue and religious faith that held impulses like victimhood, entitlement, and social revenge in check. They lived, not always happily, subject to a self-imposed code of obligation to their families, rather than drowning in self-absorbed grudge-nursing.

Today, working-class men (and women) are more susceptible to those appeals because they and their children have been seduced by welfare-statism, marinated in a therapeutic culture of excuses, and surrounded by the wreckage of small-town values that finally imploded under attack by leftist elites. They have been told, repeatedly, that their concerns are nothing more than racism and sexism, and that they should shut up. This makes them prime targets for hucksters like Trump or upscale socialist fantasy-peddlers like Bernie Sanders.

Dougherty’s advice to white working-class men in all this? Go with it. It’s your time, and none of this is your fault. Screw those guys. Get yours.

Is that the answer? To turn the Republican Party and the conservative movement itself into Trump’s angry, bastardized version of the Democratic Party? Instead of telling men to stop fleecing the disability system, to kick their addiction, to be fathers to their children, to get a job no matter how low or unappealing it is, and to stick with it until you get a better one, Dougherty plays the same condescending, bitter card of victimhood and entitlement that liberals use all the time.

If it seems cruel to wish this preening 30-year-old know-nothing on the good people of Baltimore (median household income about half the state average) consider that it is almost impossible for the city to do worse than it has…Under the current leadership — here meaning a generation or two of city leaders, not only Mayor Rawlings-Blake and her spectacular incompetence — Baltimore has become what Baltimore is. It has a police department that behaves like a warlord militia rather than a municipal law-enforcement agency; a city jail system that acts as a branch of a notorious organized-crime syndicate to such an extent that the state felt the need to shut parts of it down; “apartheid schools” operated by a wildly corrupt city school system in the habit of blowing federal stimulus funds on mother-daughter makeovers and theater tickets, cheating on standardized tests, and inflating attendance records. Political activists in bed with Salvadoran terrorist organizations? Sure, why not?

Serving a term as mayor of Baltimore would be an excellent educational opportunity for Mckesson, and he needs it: The banality of his political prose is exceeded only by the banality of his political thinking, to the extent that we can call the products of his mind “thought.”…What he is not quite clever enough to understand is that most of his ideas were put into place 40 years or more ago in Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, etc., and that what we see there is not the absence of progressive leadership but the result of it.

If the education of DeRay Mckesson turns out to be as deliciously brutal and pitiless as expected, then it also presents an opportunity to educate, to some extent, a generation of silly and ignorant young activists in aching need of a swift kick in the ass from reality.